by Dominic Rapini, CEO, Queralt, Inc.,
(Apr. 29, 2025) — In 1985, I was a biology teacher at a private school in Connecticut, making just enough to keep my ‘69 Chevy Nova alive and maybe splurge on a decent bowl of pasta every now and then. One Saturday, I tagged along with my friend Dan, a fellow teacher, to a computer store—back when computer stores felt like a cross between a sci-fi gift shop and a RadioShack with a caffeine problem.
Dan was there to buy a computer. I was just along for the ride.
He bailed. I didn’t.
I walked out with a brand-new Macintosh, an external floppy drive, an ImageWriter printer, and a $4,500 credit card bill I had no business racking up. I probably should’ve spent that money on a better car—or, you know, student loans —but something about that Mac pulled me in. I brought it home, sat down at 6 p.m., and didn’t get up until the sun rose the next morning.
I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but that moment ‘reprogrammed’ my life.
Almost immediately, I’ve begun to put that Macintosh to work. I was doing student comments on three-part carbon forms. I was running the forms through the dot matrix printer for my students, automating every crazy, tedious task. I was doing diagrams of cell structures and biology processes and incorporating them in handouts and eventually putting on transparencies up on an overhead projector. I was using the Macintosh to design pages for my football playbook and on, and on, and on. That crazy investment was already reshaping my life and the way I worked, and opening up incredible opportunities and possibilities. My imagination was on fire with all the ideas and the ways to apply this technology and all the great software into everyday solutions.
Months later, I was helping design one of the first computer labs in U.S. education. A year after that, I left teaching and jumped into computer retail. Before long, I became an expert in desktop publishing and corporate networking. Cybersecurity back then? It meant locking your floppy disks in a file cabinet. (No joke. That was “zero trust.”)
Then, in 1997, I made another decision that raised a few eyebrows. I joined Apple.
Now, keep in mind—this was not today’s Apple. This was “$4 billion in revenue and a tanking stock price” Apple. The general industry sentiment was: Apple is toast. Michael Dell famously said the best thing Apple could do was shut down and return the money to shareholders.
But a month earlier, Steve Jobs had returned to the company. And while Wall Street saw a company on life support, my instincts told me something else: this was the beginning of a comeback story. I trusted that feeling—and it paid off.
Four decades later, I’m still in tech. And I’m still glad I listened to my gut. Today for really the first time in 40 years I’m starting this see once again the incredible opportunities and possibilities around technology that I first experience in April 1985 but today it’s artificial intelligence and all the new tools that I’ve embraced in the last two years that are changing the way I do my work quite frankly these are tools that are so powerful that they empowered me to jump out of retirement and take over a company as a CEO, where AI becomes a multiplier for my talents and allow me to do the work of 10 people at times leveraging my creativity in my ideas and translating my thoughts into actions
In my lifetime, God has blessed me to witness one revolution, more than most people ever get. I’m seeing a whole second revolution that if you excuse, the hyperbole is changing my life and the life of all humanity. Man, is that awesome or what? It all started with this really bad idea: spending more money than I had on a technology that I didn’t understand, yet a technology that changed the trajectory of my entire life.
Recently, that instinct pulled me out of retirement and into a whole new challenge: cybersecurity. It’s the fastest-moving, most unpredictable space I’ve ever worked in—and I’ve seen some wild ones. But I love it. I’m now helping build a product designed to eliminate passwords and save people from the kind of financial damage phishing causes every day.
What’s the lesson here? Sometimes, the smartest moves start out looking like the crazy ones. There’s no playbook for spotting the right opportunity at the right time. Sometimes all you’ve got is a hunch and a heart that won’t shut up. Learn to trust that.
Today, I tell young people just starting out: your next job—or the job you’ll have five years from now—might not even exist yet. With AI reshaping everything faster than we can explain it, that’s more true than ever. The key is staying ready. Stay curious. Keep learning. Don’t get too complacent with your current skill set.
And when it comes to advice? Listen to friends. Listen to mentors. But never let them have the final word. That’s yours. Take everything you’ve lived and learned, and let that guide you.
Learn to recognize opportunity, learn to recognize when a revolution is upon you.
Ironically, some friends told me I should just enjoy retirement. Maybe take up fishing but I resisted. And now here I am—building a phishing-resistant software platform instead. Life’s funny like that.
We’re all wired with intuition for a reason. Sometimes, you’ve got to lean in, take the leap, and trust that voice in your head that says, This might actually work.
It just might.
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